Speed!

It has often been said that the Internet speed in Japan is the fastest in the world - and with speeds of up to 100Mbps (Mega bits per second) available, they're probably right. However, I've not really had the chance to fully test my Internet connection here - until now that is. Just yesterday I commenced download of a 1GB file from a Japanese server and saw some surprising figures in the dialogue that followed. Starting at a transfer rate of just over 1MBps (Mega Bytes per second), the connection eventually settled to about 332KBps (Kilo Bytes per second) at 30MB in. Bare in mind that this is on a cheap cable package deal connection, but it still blows away the speeds I used to get in the UK. Needless to say, the rest of the world has some catching up to do.